School of Humanities, University of Hong Kong

Other African Studies Courses

LING2052 Swahili Structure and Universal Grammar (6 credits)

(This course is also offered to second and third year non-BA students for inter-faculty broadening purposes.)

Swahili is the most widely spoken African language and one of the most intensively studied in many universities in Africa, Europe, and North America. In this course, an overview of the major features of Swahili, as well as Bantu linguistics, will be provided. The basics of phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics will be covered, with emphasis on the morphosyntactic component of the language. Students will learn how to analyze basic Swahili sentence structures from formal perspectives, using the basics of grammatical frameworks such as Lexical Functional Grammar and the Minimalist approaches. Prior knowledge of introductory linguistics and spoken Swahili are helpful but not essential.

Assessment: 100% coursework.

For details of the course LING2052, please approach the Department of Linguistics of the School of Humanities.